STIRRING

Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.

Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.

ARDIC TENUTA

My physics teacher’s pet cockroaches

Lay eggs, then eat the hatchlings. His daughter is so sick. He forgets to feed them. Laurel Fox argues, cannibalism reduces population size before acute resource shortages cause physiological stress. It is an experiment. He owns a millipede. It was bought illegally. Wash your hands after touching.The mites are symbiotic. The class takes turns feeding the cockroaches. His millipede is so sick. While he is out, we hold a wake for the millipede. No, cockroaches do not live forever. No, they cannot survive a nuclear war. We dare each other to eat them. Fox likens this to spacing behavior,dominance hierarchies in social animals. The millipede coiled so perfectly dead. On average, cockroaches live for a year and three months. They were a gift from his daughter. The millipede is fed to the cockroaches. Symbiotic may be definedasdenoting mutually beneficial relationships between different groups. Of the original five there are now twenty. After every class he reads to them goodnight. There, beneath lullabies they eat themselves asleep.

Adric Tenuta’s poems appear in Crab Fat Magazine and The Columbia Review. They are majoring in creative writing and women’s gender and sexuality studies at Emory University.